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Factcheck: Why the UK will not run out of oil, coal or gas in five years

16 May 2014, 15:45

Simon Evans

CC2.0 Gary Bembridge

The BBC
reportsthat the UK will run out of oil, coal and
gas in just over five years. But that isn't true, according to an
author of thestudythe story is based on.

The problem is that the BBC confuses reserves
and resources. It's an easymistaketo make.

Reserves versus resources

Reserves are fossil fuels that are known to be
recoverable given current costs, prices, technical abilities and
other constraints.

Resources are the often much larger amounts
known or suspected to be available. These may or may not be
recoverable, depending on advances in technology and future price
fluctuations.

Here's what the BBC says:

"In just over five years
Britain will have run out of oil, coal and gas, researchers have
warned. A report by the Global Sustainability Institute said
shortages would increase dependency on Norway, Qatar and
Russia."

We spoke to Dr Aled Jones, director of
theGlobal Resource Observatorythat produced
the research. "The BBC headline was a bit misleading", he
says.

The UK would only run out if it stopped - or was
prevented from - importing any oil, gas or coal, and if it somehow
became too expensive to exploit the UK's remaining
reserves.

Dr Jones says:

"The bottom line is
we're not about to run out, but there is a global political
question here. We're reliant on imports from countries that are
occasionally unstable. Our report tried to understand the links
between prices, political risk and the location of
reserves."

So how much oil and gas does the UK
have?

The North Sea boom years are behind us, but the
UK's wells have not yet run completely dry.

We compared data on reserves and consumption to
calculate how long it would take to use up current
reserves.

It turns out that the UK has been 'running out'
of oil for decades. In fact, the UK has had much less than 15 years
of oil reserves remaining for the past 30 years (blue
line).

But at a global level reserves have grown - faster
than rising consumption (red line).

But the UK had less than three years' worth of
reserves three years ago too, and we haven't run out yet. Again,
further reserves have been opened up through exploration or
changing prices.

How much of our fossil fuel reserves can we
burn if we want to avoid dangerous climate change?

The UK - still less the world - is not about to
run out of fossil fuels. That doesn't mean we should keep burning
them until we do, however.

Available reserves are so plentiful that only a
fraction can be used if we want to avoid dangerous climate change
of more than 2 degrees.

To meet this aim the world is supposed to avoid
burning thetrillionth tonneof carbon. - that's a
thousand billion tonnes. So far we have burned around half
that.

There are already more than enough fossil fuel
reserves listed on stock markets around the world to break that
trillion tonne budget,according tothinktank Carbon Tracker. If
you include proven but not listed reserves the excess is even
bigger:

And if you start counting not just the reserves
known to be recoverable today but the resources thought to be
buried underground, the excess becomes huge. The global coal
resource is well over 20 trillion tonnes,
figuresfrom the International Energy Agency
show.

So the BBC had the story half right. There are
tough questions to answer around the UK's dependence on fossil
energy. Not because we're going to run out, but because the UK -
and the world - has far too much.